Asperger's: possibly just more scientific, literal outlook

Robyn has now learnt to make eye contact, but not to break it. We are eyeball to eyeball for nearly two hours. She has worked hard to understand how neuro-typical people feel:

“It’s like you have a jar in your head and you have emotional tokens which swoosh round, so you’ve got a constant flow. With people on the autistic spectrum, the jar gets full really, really quickly and then it explodes and they get scared and they don’t know what to do.”

Robyn finds strong feeling — whether hunger, anger or affection — frightening and confusing, and it’s mostly this that has scuppered her relationships. Physical problems, she says, can be overcome. “I hate anyone hugging me. But one friend squeezes me gently round the waist while I look away.” The biggest problem is finding a connection and maintaining it. “During my teens I was practically a recluse because people were so horrible to me. I didn’t learn the things I should have done. Now I’m in my twenties, I find it easier to say, ‘I’m not very good at this,’ because I know neuro-typicals don’t find it easy either.”

...

He has a normal IQ but is profoundly autistic. If you say, “Would you like to work in a shop?”, he will say “No”, because he has no way of knowing if he’d like it. And anyway, one shop is not the same as another.

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At 11, an educational psychologist said, “I’m happy to tell you that Peter is among the top 2% of the population,” which, since Peter was unable to get anything down on paper, made his parents feel worse rather than better. “His teacher used to say, ‘If only I could find the starter button.’” At secondary school, homework involved standing next to his mother, Ann, who would say, “Why? What? When?”, then quickly type what he said. “He knew all the answers. But his thinking was, ‘Why are they asking?’ It made no sense to him.”

...

She needs to know what’s coming, what’s certain, rather than what might be. She is not an order freak — she quite likes mess — but worries about shopping and food all day. She is hypersensitive to colour and texture.

...

She sums up the fear and uncertainty of his world very neatly: “I might bring out a cup of tea in a minute or an elephant might drop from the sky. For Robbie, those two things are equally possible. And the gap goes on widening. I think, ‘Woo-hoo, Rob walked to the bus stop on his own.’ Then you realise other 20-year-olds are backpacking in Peru. But within the context of Rob, he’s doing fantastically well. At one point I saw no future for him at all, because I thought he’d kill himself. It is a Greek curse to possess the intelligence to see what you can never have.”

Parts of this remind me of LSD. On LSD, all possibilities are equal, so an elephant dropping from the sky might be about as likely as a sunny day. You might like one shop and not another. Without specificity and structure to the reasoning, categories lose all meaning, as a consequence of having lost a linear view of time. It is both dysfunctional, and informative.

Parts of this remind me of pure science. One shop is not equal to another. It may be bad logic to assume that elephants will not drop out of the sky since we have no complete logic except "that doesn't normally happen."

Something tells me Aspies would be great warriors to carry out a rote but exacting task like "exterminate everyone under 120 IQ points and all morally degenerate people."

You write constantly about what you want to be right, what you want to be. Unfortunately, I don't think you yet know how to refer to the real world in order to realistically ground your ideas.

Aspergers and autistics exterminating dumb people? What exactly do you expect to happen next, after mentioning this? Every time you mention something like this you're just deluding yourself and looking like an idiot. Many times has world had an effectively organised bunch of school-bullied recluses trying to murder everyone they thought was lame (e.g. Nazis), but it didn't work ever because the idea (think about what the actual implementation requires, even if you're enough of a sadist to enjoy such practices) is FUCKING RETARDED, and the clique got invaded by everyone else, and they failed.

You write constantly about what you want to be right, what you want to be. Unfortunately, I don't think you yet know how to refer to the real world in order to realistically ground your ideas.

Aspergers and autistics exterminating dumb people? What exactly do you expect to happen next, after mentioning this? Every time you mention something like this you're just deluding yourself and looking like an idiot. Many times has world had an effectively organised bunch of school-bullied recluses trying to murder everyone they thought was lame (e.g. Nazis), but it didn't work ever because the idea (think about what the actual implementation requires, even if you're enough of a sadist to enjoy such practices) is FUCKING RETARDED, and the clique got invaded by everyone else, and they failed.

I can't quite figure out what point you are actually making, other than "I disagree". Care to elaborate?

You write constantly about what you want to be right, what you want to be. Unfortunately, I don't think you yet know how to refer to the real world in order to realistically ground your ideas.

Aspergers and autistics exterminating dumb people? What exactly do you expect to happen next, after mentioning this? Every time you mention something like this you're just deluding yourself and looking like an idiot. Many times has world had an effectively organised bunch of school-bullied recluses trying to murder everyone they thought was lame (e.g. Nazis), but it didn't work ever because the idea (think about what the actual implementation requires, even if you're enough of a sadist to enjoy such practices) is FUCKING RETARDED, and the clique got invaded by everyone else, and they failed.